September 17, 2008, 08:13 PM ET

Wired Youth Dialogue: Siva on an American, Not Teen, Condition

Mark’s question about how we would all be better off if people (I would expand it beyond young people to include all people) took one hour otherwise spent on consumption and distraction and applied it to exploring the history and culture of the Middle East is insightful.

I would love to see that! But why stop at children?

Isn’t the problem that there are no clear rewards or incentives for such a behavioral change?

We live in a national culture that eschews — even ridicules — knowledge, reason, logic, and standards of empirical evidence. Demonstrate a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of any issue in the public sphere and stand to be ridiculed, dismissed, or edited with extreme prejudice.

The results of this allergy to deep thought and knowledge is clear and painful. The decision to invade Iraq predates the rise of MySpace and Facebook. More Americans believe in angels than evolution. And well into 2005, almost half of all Americans believed that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had something to do with 9/11.

So the malady he diagnoses is both older and deeper than the technology at our fingertips or how teens budget their time. I don’t worry as much about teenagers with computers when old people with cars, guns, credit cards, and the right to vote seem just as unwilling to critically engage with the truth and its consequences.

We may have lost the grounding in enlightenment thinking that gave James Madison and Thomas Jefferson their faith in the potential of a democratic republic. I can’t get all worked up over the distracting power of Facebook when I reflect on the state of national willful ignorance. Old people scare me more than young people do.

But as long as we are considering the role of Facebook and social networking platforms, let’s consider these two facts that Mark invokes in his last post:

“Social networking is the primary activity for teens online, as you can see here,”

and

“When Esther Hargittai, whom Siva mentions, polled college students on their online destinations, Facebook and MySpace ranked No. 1 and 2, but what really surprised her was the low interest in politics, law, economics, or policy.”

In these comments and your recent book you take the frivolity of social networking as a given. And you take its online environment as an indication that it is new and distinct. I choose a more tempered view of both these assumptions. Social networking need not be frivolous — although it often is. But let’s not discount the value of frivolity in an otherwise stressful life. And socialization online is not all that different in terms of its attractiveness and its effects than “real world” social networking was when I was young.

As danah boyd has shown in her research, young people tend to use online environments when offline environments fail to offer them what they crave and expect: a sense of autonomy (in terms of reputation, persona, and cultural expertise) and a sense of — believe it or not — privacy. The privacy to which I refer is the ability to pose, communicate, and forge relationships beyond the surveillance of parents, teachers, and security guards. These are real and important needs for all people, not just young people. We all need space beyond the gaze of those who rule us. Teens just have fewer ways to find that space. Thus MySpace.

Of course, the problem with MySpace stepping in to satisfy these social needs is that such services are hardly beyond the gaze of authority. And they invite people to satiate their needs to connect and perform in the shallowest, most commercial ways.

The problem with MySpace is not that it is digital. The problem is that it is a distillation of a greater American cultural and political problem: All we seen to have is the ubiquitous shopping mall.

This is why the high use of libraries by all segments of America inspires me. Libraries and parks are the only spaces left unmarked by commercial exploitation.